


Veni, vidi, vici

by shiva_goddessof



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Holmes Brothers, Mycroft is a Bit Not Good, Other, Post-Reichenbach, only the major character death you already know about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:55:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27263092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiva_goddessof/pseuds/shiva_goddessof
Summary: “Caring is not an advantage,” Mycroft Holmes whispers to the four-year-old who is sniffling into his pressed shirt.The making of Mycroft Holmes, in six lessons.
Relationships: Mycroft Holmes & Sherlock Holmes
Kudos: 16





	Veni, vidi, vici

**Author's Note:**

> This was written some years back between S2 and S3, and is thus only canon-compliant up to this point. Specifically, I envisaged Holmes parents less cuddly than the ones we eventually met.  
> Please see the endnotes for Latin translations and some character and political context.

**1\. 1980**

“Caring is not an advantage,” Mycroft Holmes whispers to the four-year-old who is sniffling into his pressed shirt.

Mycroft is eleven and sometimes he feels much older. He is the man of the house. He remembers that day: Mrs. Doherty, sitting down on the bed and patting the space beside her, a very serious look on her face. _You’re the man of the house now, Mycroft. You’ve got to look after them._ He could hear that the words were special, that they meant something big and important. He remembers tilting his head and watching her face, the redness around her eyes like but not like the redness of Mummy’s, the patterns of red lines that decorated her nose and cheeks. Her hands smell of scrubbed vegetables and her breath smells of cough sweets and the drinks cabinet in the drawing room.

 _But I already look after them_ , he’d said, and she laughed, sadly, and straightened his collar, his black tie. _I know_ , she said. _You’re a good boy_.

He’d heard those words somewhere, where was it? Listening at doors as they both do, trying to outdo each other in moving through the house as silently as possible. _Let’s be like mice_ , he said to Sherlock, and look how well that turned out. Mice are careful, mice are quiet. They move on velvet feet and no-one ever sees them. Mice hear everything.

(“Oh, come on, Sigur. That’s absurd, and it’s cruel. You don’t care -”

“Don’t be so sentimental, Violet. Caring is not an advantage here. The boy won’t learn unless he’s made to learn.”

“That’s your solution to everything, isn’t it? You don’t even know him. You’re never here.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, woman. There’s no talking to you. Fine, do what you like, but don’t blame me when he hurts one of the other children. Or his brother.”

“Oh, you - “

Angry footsteps. A door slams.)

The words sound serious and mature, so Mycroft says them again. “Caring is not an advantage,” he says, smoothing back Sherlock’s hair and taking from him the trap with the pathetic little broken body. “We have to do these things, it’s important. We can’t have too many mice in the house. Mummy says they’re bad for it.”

Sherlock blinks at him fearfully. “But you said we were mice.”

He tightens his arm. “I said we were _like_ mice. You’re too big to be a mouse.”

Sherlock giggles in his hitching way, his face still smeared with tears. “I’m not big!”

“You’re bigger than a mouse. Maybe you’re too big to creep around. You’ll get stuck,” he says, tickling Sherlock just above his itchy collar.

Sherlock squeals and wrestles away from him, giggling; Mycroft grabs him by the sleeve and pulls him back. “Will I get caught in a trap?”

“No,” says Mycroft. “We’re too big for that.”

“Will I die?”

“No,” says Mycroft firmly. “We’re too clever for that.”

“Father was clever.”

Mycroft feels serious. Sherlock remembers _everything_ , and somehow Mycroft knows that both of them will remember what he says now for a long time. Awkwardly, he hitches Sherlock’s slight body up onto his hip. “I know,” he says solemnly. “I didn’t know, before. I wasn’t watching. I’ll watch, now.”

Sherlock is losing interest already. “Can I draw?”

“All right. They’ll come and get us soon, though. Don’t go far.”

He straightens his own jacket and waits for Mummy and the long black car.

*

After his twelfth birthday, he is sent to Eton.

Quiet, pudgy redheads are not always those picked first for football and Eton fives. But Mycroft is a master of watching, and listening, and knowing exactly how to stand so he is not noticed, how to move so that he is not a threat. How to be so still that people forget he is there.

It comes to be known, very quietly, that Mycroft Holmes knows things, and hears things, and that in exchange for helping him, he may be able to tell you some of these things. Quietly, he settles into this world, of the rich and the obsequious and the brash and the dull. There is no real _intelligence_ here, but he can make do. Sometimes he thinks, rather wistfully, of the leaves tangled in Sherlock’s hair and the quiet, preoccupied babble as Sherlock leans against his knee.

He knows how to interpret the fact that the cheerful letters Mummy sends him never mention Sherlock. He knows how to interpret the lack of letters in large, childish scrawl.

He writes to Sherlock: _They don’t know you. They know little of anything. They will not matter, in the future. You must not care_.

When he is thirteen Mummy sends him, without comment, Father’s ring. It’s too big for any of his fingers, and it would undoubtedly be snatched off if he wore it in front of the other boys. He turns it around, in secret, at night, reading the words etched into the polished inner side: _Omnia vincit amor._ He looks them up.

He learns Latin, at Eton. _Alea iacta est. Fata viam invenient. Vincit qui se vincit._ He learns mathematics. He learns French. He learns chemistry. He learns politics.

*

He had learned, quickly, that there is more than one way to hold power, and that to be seen to do it is not necessarily any more potent than to do it quietly. He sees much. He sees furtive meetings in rooms that seem empty; he sees scrawled notes with codes that a child could break; he sees secret hiding places and undercurrents of fear and lust and control and rebellion. He says little, until he needs to.

*

At twelve, Sherlock is sent to Harrow, in the grand tradition of younger sons. Mycroft sees him every holiday, at first. His energy has gone nowhere, but it has curdled somehow into something thick and altogether sharper than Mycroft remembers. Mycroft observes unnoticed the first time, but the second, Sherlock sees his eyes flickering over him and stiffens, sharply. He learns to hold himself loosely, unobtrusively, but there are things Mycroft sees, things he knows he is meant to see, as the soft edges of Sherlock are pared away one by one along with every trace of baby fat. The shadows under his eyes darken. Yellow stains appear defiantly around his fingernails. His clothes speak of lost dusty spaces and moonlit crushed grass and rough, heavy hands.

(”Here, Holmes, my brother says your freak brother’s been - “)

He writes to Sherlock: _Remember Caesar. It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience._ He doesn't expect a reply.

The ring fits, now. He wears it on his right hand. No-one seems to notice.

**2\. 1989**

“Caring is not an advantage,” he says brightly, at twenty, to the man from MI5.

He smiles a precisely calibrated smile. He has been expecting this for some time. They have been watching, and he has watched back. Why do so few people truly know how to _look_ at things? “Of course, one wants to serve one’s country,” he says, crossing his left leg over his right. “And there is a tradition in my family, as you know. But I’ve found it is wise to be able to… take a more objective view from time to time.”

The man opposite nods, and allows the faintest and dryest of smiles to cross his face in return.

Oxford had been easy. Christchurch, PPE; not obtrusive, but it does give one the chance to meet a few of the right people. No need for the tedious striving for Union president and so on; although of course he attends. Unwise to do too well, to attract too much attention, and his future course does not require it. But sometimes -

Sometimes the time is heavy. People are so predictable; and so embarrassingly easy to manipulate. He challenges himself sometimes; spreads his webs further; makes calculated bets on what he hears from private conversations and the barest hints from newspaper articles. When the tedium reaches a peak in the middle of his second year, he drops a few casual words into the ear of an associate, and watches them ripple through the student, then the local, and the national media. The man could have been useful later, he supposes, had a blind eye continued to be turned; but there are some things that Mycroft prefers not to stomach if he does not have to.

He writes letters to Sherlock still, occasionally, when he is particularly lonely. He knows that not all of them are read, but he believes that some of them are. He writes of alcoholic lecturers and students who steal compulsively and the theft of one of the paintings from Oriel College, which is transparently the work of the vice-president of the university anarchist society (how droll). There is never a reply, but a battered package addressed to him turns out to contain a Harrow boater with several cigarette holes scorched through it. Mycroft smiles ruefully, and hangs it on the coathook in his bedroom.

He is careful, too, not to do too well in his Finals; it will only attract attention he will then have to deflect. But the message comes first, a scrawled postcard slipped into his college pigeonhole which, read with the right emphasis, suggests a place and a time. And a man.

“Intelligence is not what it used to be,” says the man, carefully. “We generally find that it’s advantageous to be thought rather less intelligent than we are.”

Mycroft nods and smiles again, with a humour which is, surprisingly, unforced. He is finding this man pleasingly unboring. He slips his hand into his pocket and rubs his thumb lightly around the ring.

**3\. 2004**

“Caring is not an advantage,” says Mycroft placidly to his handpicked choice from the usual scanty and overpriced graduate intake.

Her eyes are tracking him; she looks wide-eyed and overawed. Mycroft pushes back his cuffs slightly, begins to roll up his sleeves. “Do you know why I requested that you meet with me, Miss Knight?”

She shakes her head slowly; pushes her glossy brown hair behind one ear. Mycroft admires, briefly, both the aesthetics of the gesture and its perfectly studied air of unconsciousness.

He leans back in his office chair. “You have been trained in a number of things so far, by the current masters of the universe. Deception, intelligence, focused analysis.” Mycroft allows a little disdain to creep into his voice. “Did you find these things interesting?”

She clears her throat quietly. “Yes, sir.” Her grip on the edge of the hardwood chair flexes slightly.

“Indeed you have, in one way.” Mycroft curls his lip, glances nonchalantly at the painting in the corner. “And you sit there, playing the wide-eyed ingénue, scared and overwhelmed, with no small degree of skill. Yet there is a part of you, is there not, that is downright amused by my… theatricality. Am I wrong?”

He allows his eyes to flicker back to her face. Oh - _there_ \- a frankly assessing look, a faint and humorous quiver of the lower lip. It warms his heart, if such a thing is still possible.

“I have no presumptions, sir,” she says, with a barely perceptible flicker of mirth. “I’m sure there’s nothing special about me.”

“Have you joined us to serve your country, Miss Knight?” Mycroft says, carefully completing the rolling of his sleeves and picking up the teapot. (Seeing him make tea is wonderfully disarming of people, for some reason.)

“Of course, sir,” she says, keeping her gaze modestly on the desk as he pours. “I know it’s not… something that many people feel these days, but I’ve always wanted to do my bit.” Her blue eyes meet his innocently.

“That is why I selected you.” Mycroft adds milk, selects a teaspoon, pushes the cup across the desk. “Your trainers will have told you that one of the hardest parts of this work is the secrecy. The learning to control what you reveal. The hiding of your true face, your true self. I imagine the introductory lectures haven’t changed a great deal in the last fifteen years.”

That flicker of amusement again as she nods. God, this is glorious. “The idea, of course, being that one face is true, and all the others are false.” Mycroft raises an eyebrow. “Have you found that to be true, in your experience, Miss Knight?”

“I believe I’d like it if you called me Sarah, sir,” she says, her eyes dancing merrily.

“Very well, Sarah,” says Mycroft, raising his own cup to his lips delicately. “And is that what is on your birth certificate?”

“No, sir,” she says dryly. “But I’ve always found Phoebe to be rather a mouthful. And, as you say, a girl retains the right to reinvent herself.”

Mycroft permits himself a smile. “You studied Classics, did you not?” He waits for her nod. “It is an underappreciated discipline these days, with much to recommend it. Are you familiar with the Stoics?”

“I know a little, sir,” she says calmly. “We focused rather more on literature than philosophy.”

“What everyone knows of them is that they believed in clarity of thought. Mental discipline, rigour. That emotions clouded the judgement.” He returns the cup to its saucer. “But they also believed in accepting what is. Having no illusions about the world. I have found that to help greatly. It is of no use to be overinvested in how people should be, or what they should do. One must deal with what they are.” There is a pause. Sarah crosses one leg over the other, assumes a look of polite expectancy.

“I can teach you to cultivate this,” Mycroft says evenly. “To be, always, able to accept the nature of what is. To be all of your faces, when you need to be, and yet retain the ability to never quite be any of them. Do you wish to work with me?”

“It sounds… interesting, sir,” she says, with a caution which seems, so far as he can tell, unfeigned. “But are you sure I’m right for this?”

“You have seen the official motto of the Service. This office has an unofficial one: _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes_ , often mistakenly attributed to Plato, usually translated as ‘Who watches the watchers?’” Mycroft crosses his own left leg over, mirroring her posture. “I have watched you carefully. I don’t believe I am wrong.”

“So who does watch the watchers, then?” she asks, with striking but quite pleasing boldness.

“I watch everybody, Miss Knight,” Mycroft says, setting down his teaspoon with a clink. “That generally has to suffice.”

“Sarah,” she says, with polite emphasis.

“Sarah,” he agrees, leaning back in his chair, templing his hands under his chin, and waiting - _there_ \- for her gleam of amusement. "For now."

*

Physics has its lessons too, Mycroft has cause to reflect. The act of observation changes, by its very nature, that which is observed.

Sherlock now drops off the radar for long periods, then makes pointedly casual appearances in areas with multiple cameras, wearing an air of injured innocence. He came home for Mummy’s birthday, bared his own teeth in response to her increasingly vague smile. His cuffs will be pristine, his hairline marred by only the faintest tinge of sweat. He will move with a grace that is studied, but never quite perfect. Then there will be the flicker, the tremor, the casual flexing of his arm that reveals an infinitesimal pinprick of red. He will hold Mycroft’s eye with pupils which are just barely too dilated for the light and call him “brother dear”. He will see Mycroft see, and his eyes will glitter with pride.

Mycroft will smile back, blandly, and school every muscle but those which flare his nostrils in the faintest hint of disgust.

**4\. 2006**

“Caring is not an advantage,” Mycroft says wearily to Thérèse Violet Holmes, _née_ Deveraux, as they gaze through a set of slatted blinds.

“It seems terribly extreme, darling,” she says fretfully, with the soft hint of her accent. “Must we really?”

“We cannot help him any other way, Mummy. You heard Dr. Chambers; to protect him from the consequences of his actions is merely to enable the habit.” It has been too long since he was questioned; Mycroft forces his voice into patience.

“You know best, I’m sure,” she says, fussing with her silk scarf. “He seems so… quiet, though. Couldn’t we take him home ourselves?”

Mycroft steers her to one of the revolting plastic chairs nearby. “Shall I try and speak to him?” he says soothingly. “If he will agree, perhaps we can arrange something. I think it would be wise of us not to be too hopeful, though.”

Her worried face smooths immediately. “Oh, yes, darling,” she says gratefully. “I’m sure you’ll be able to sort it out.”

Sherlock has been found. A raid on a drugs den in Limehouse had discovered him propped vacantly against a wall, and his minimal resistance combined with the rapid exit of the rest of the house’s inhabitants had made him a popular catch. Mycroft has developed a few useful contacts within the Drugs Squad, and Detective Sergeant Lestrade had called him even before an operative had spotted the surveillance footage and filed a report. Mycroft had made his preparations, collected Mummy, and ordered his driver to take him to the hospital.

Mycroft prides himself on his ability to confront the facts.

These are the facts: Sherlock will not stop.

These are the facts: Sherlock will not stop and it is not in Mycroft’s power to compel him to.

These are the facts: Sherlock will not stop and it is not in Mycroft’s power to compel him to, but situations can be managed, and a few pieces have, for once, fallen into line.

Sherlock has not spoken yet, but his head tracks around to fix on Mycroft as he pushes open the door, and he blinks at approximately a third of his usual speed.

“Hello, brother,” Mycroft says softly, letting the door fall closed behind him. “You have worried Mummy most terribly, haven’t you?”

Sherlock blinks again. His lips move soundlessly. His skin is drawn tightly over his cheekbones, and almost translucent. Mycroft pulls one of the execrable chairs closer to the bed, picks up one of Sherlock’s slack hands. “Can you hear me?” he says quietly.

Sherlock blinks again, but there is little comprehension in his eyes. Mycroft sighs, shifts himself onto the bed to sit alongside Sherlock. His body feels heavy. He places an arm, tentatively, around the pitifully bony shoulders. “I wish you had never gone down this path, Sherlock,” he says, seeing his reflection in his impeccably polished toes. “If you knew how many nights… but there is no sense in this. I am sorry you’ve been brought to this. I always hoped to prevent it.”

He reaches down into the coat pocket between himself and Sherlock and extracts the short syringe. He flicks the needle cover off, dexterously, with the fingers of his right hand. Sherlock’s crumpled, untucked shirt is no particular barrier; he pushes it aside and slides the needle gently, sweetly, home into the skin above his hip. “I give you the only thing I have left to give you,” he says, with the best composure he can muster, ducking his head so that his lips cannot be read from the window.

Sherlock does not move for a few seconds; then gradually a tremor begins to ripple through him, from the toes upwards. A low, thin, whining noise begins to emanate from his lips. One hand curls inwards convulsively and begins a dogged, repetitive scratching at the inside of the other wrist. Mycroft shifts himself carefully back into the chair, and waits until the trembling arm swipes the bedside table away with a resonating crash.

Mycroft bows his head, rises, and goes to join his mother and the doctor. “I tried my best,” he says, with regret as thick and sweet as honey. “But he became violently agitated when I mentioned coming home with us. Doctor, must we really…?”

Chambers nods his head with ponderous self-satisfaction. “His patterns of response suggest that there may be underlying schizoid tendencies. It’s never the preferred approach, but it’s our best option at this point, Mr. Holmes. I’m truly sorry for the distress to your family.”

Mycroft glances at Mummy questioningly; her hands are trembling, but she swallows hard, and raises her chin. “Very well, Doctor,” she says, with a flicker of the resolution he remembers from his childhood.

Chambers lifts the clipboard and signs the form, confirming involuntary restraint of a patient under Section Two of the Mental Health Act.

**5\. 2010**

“Caring is not an advantage,” Mycroft tells his impossible, unpredictable, essential younger brother.

It is Christmas Eve and the air is raw and cold. Mycroft’s pockets, besides his gloves, contain: his phone, a pack of cigarettes (new; neither his brand nor Sherlock’s), and his Corona lighter. (It had been a gift, precisely one year ago, from the Home Secretary’s personal assistant.)

This is the moment; this is the fulcrum. If Sherlock falls, it will be here.

He had thought he would be always alone in this.

Sherlock has been clean - for a given value of clean - for two years, three months, one week, and four days. Mycroft had watched that last hit over one of the few consistently-working CCTV cameras in one of the more unpleasant areas of Hackney, knowing he was meant to, that it was Sherlock’s concession but also his warning. He did not see, and did not expect to, the effects of the following weeks. When Sherlock emerged - rail-thin but purposeful, moving with a coordination Mycroft had almost forgotten - it was to Vauxhall Arches, to Scotland Yard, to the industrial wastelands of Wapping and Limehouse, not to the bare but neatly-appointed bedroom in Richmond for which the key still swings on his ring.

This time of year, the idea, the thought of _family_ creeps under the skin, weighs down his limbs, in a way only one person in the world might spot. Because, after all of this, he makes no sense without Sherlock, nor does Sherlock make sense without him. Mycroft’s demons are not the noisy, messy, anarchic fiends of search warrants and locked rooms and grubby riverside murder scenes, but he finds himself still unwilling to contemplate a world which contains no other person who understands the uselessness, the frustration, the sheer overwhelming _stupidity_.

He has thrown Sherlock in harm’s way, and harm is coming to him, if only in his beautiful, disastrous head.

“All lives end. All hearts are broken,” he says, watching his little brother’s face and wondering precisely how wrong this can go. It had been calculated; but Sherlock is so rarely calculated. Every now and then, Mycroft feels a stab of pride that he is, still, so incalculable.

“Do you ever think there’s something wrong with us?” Sherlock asks, staring out through the glass.

 _Yes_ , Mycroft thinks.

 _No_ , Mycroft thinks.

**6\. 2011**

_Caring is not an advantage_ , Mycroft Holmes tells himself, not for the first time.

Mycroft is forty-three and sometimes he feels much older. He feels it lately, the groan and pop of his joints as he rises from his chair, the way the skin of his face seems to sag, weighed down by the invisible and unliftable weight. His head aches. He rises now. He folds the _Sun_ and puts it aside. The black car is waiting for him.

It’s not raining, but the air is misty and damp; he takes his umbrella.

The oratory is long and colourless. The white lilies are forced and sickly in their perfume. The grass and soil clings to his shoes.

Did Sherlock think of him, even for a second, up on the roof? Did he remember the library, the space under the rhododendron bushes, the nights that Mycroft awoke with a small warm bundle snuggled against his spine?

John doesn’t come.

Mycroft stands by the stone, afterwards, until everyone has left, his colleagues murmuring words of tasteful condolence, Anthea hovering behind and answering his diverted calls, and knows himself for an abject and utter failure. 

_I came,_ he thinks. _I saw._

He flicks the end of his cigarette onto the damp grass beside the stone and lights another. Sherlock's brand. The car is waiting. He turns.

**Author's Note:**

> A note for non-UK readers: being involuntarily detained on mental health grounds is known in the UK as 'sectioning', because the powers to do it are laid out in various sections of the 1983 Mental Health Act.
> 
> For a Latin glossary, a further discussion of sectioning, visual on a Harrow boater, and some character backstory, go [ here](https://shiva-goddessof.livejournal.com/2771.html).


End file.
